The invention relates to a foil removal device and a method for removing a protective foil from a tire tread.
Tire treads are usually provided with a protective foil on the application side. This protective foil needs to be removed prior to application of the tire tread to a tire carcass. Currently, the protective foil is manually removed. The removal is a time consuming process which dominates the tire tread application cycle time. Furthermore, the protective foil tears easily and is hard and heavy to be consistently removed by hand. Finally, any manual intervention during or after removal of the protective foil is likely to damage or contaminate the exposed application side of the tire tread.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a foil removal device and a method for removing a protective foil from a tire tread, which at least partially solves one or more of the aforementioned drawbacks of manual removal.